Playing In the Street

Let’s dial back to 1490. Italian landscapes were incidental backgrounds to  religious storylines. The moral authority and purpose of the painting was their sacred story. But, occupying the distance was a landscape with silhouetted cities and trees, meandering serpentine roads, and far off mountains. The sensation of plausible deep space generated by the landscape supported the credibility of the sacred story (see example 1, Martyrdom of St Lucy).  With a persuasive landscape behind her the miraculous absurdity of the knifed and roped St. Lucy effortlessly withstanding the pull of a team of oxen was more easily overlooked. Landscape painting eventually dismisses the sacred characters and refocuses on the pleasures of distant view. Within 150 years Dutch landscape painters could give their clients a view of deep space with a meandering road and a few diminutive wandering gypsies (see example 2, Jan Van Acken, 1650). The structure of the two landscapes is remarkably parallel despite their separation by time and geography.

Example 1.Bernardino Fungai, 1490.

Example 2.Jan Van Aken, 1650,

Artists found metaphorical substitutes for the traditional meandering roads or rivers as you see in this 1939 photograph by Edward Weston of the Golden Canyon in Death Valley (example 3). He discovered Golden Canyon’s weathered ridgelines offered the same meandering experience as with the road behind St Lucy.  You can trace the metamorphosis of  the hills of St Lucy’s and Van Acken’s landscape in the terrain photographed by Weston.  Within 25 years Diebenkorn and Thiebaud found the urban tangle of layered highways offered a fresh resource for meanderings into distance (example 4, Wayne Thiebaud landscape). Modern civil and structural highway engineering continues to cast a spell for artists. This modern subject engages the linear and curvilinear perspective skills of artists. The game is too difficult to resist. Emma Sutton tried her hand in 2005 on black prepared paper as you see in example 5.

Example 3. Edward Weston, 1939.

Example 4. Wayne Thiebaud.

Example 5. Emma Sutton, 2005.

Artists like Julie Mehrehtu and Regina Scully pursued the possibilities of meandering perspectives but, married them to modern abstraction. What do you get if you combine principles of linear perspective with abstraction? Initially we got Cubism, Analytic and Synthetic. Those rectilinear forms were too constrained for an artist like Regina Scully; the result is her 2015 acrylic “Cosmographia” (example 6). Scully takes the premise of a map’s information can be brought to  life through dancing distortions of perspective.

Example 6. Regina Scully,2015.

As I journeyed through Providence, Rhode Island’s central city mall I found new engaging perspectives. Example 7 is my photo using a 360 degree app. on my Ipad.  Example 8 is my reconfigured and painted response to this image.

Example 7, Ipad 360 app photo.

Example 8. Painting on anodized aluminum,12×36.

I brought a meandering tangle of linear perspective closer to the ground plane in my painting of trolley tracks  from New Orleans (example 9). The opportunity for cursive entanglement grew from my layering the trolley tracks.

Example 9, Trolley tracks.

My last two examples (example 10 and 11) refer back to the Martyrdom of St Lucy. I returned to the idea of a road as foreground. I replaced the oxen with charging taxis. The characters are now anonymous, no St. Lucy or her persecutors. Architecture still flanks and frames the picture as it did in 1490. My colors are no less symbolic but their meaning has altered over time.

Example 10. Taxi Charge.

Example 11. Full Fare.